


Our Last Days

by enigma731



Series: Roads I Used to Run [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Clint Barton has a farm, Developing Relationship, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-31
Updated: 2014-10-31
Packaged: 2018-02-23 09:01:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2541908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/enigma731/pseuds/enigma731
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The property looks mostly abandoned, the fields barren, save for occasional patches of lanky corn stalks, growing rebelliously toward the sky. A few yards away to her right is the skeleton of a rusted-out car, like a sun-bleached skull in the desert. But there’s something about the house--faded white, with a dramatically sloped roof and a long porch--that resonates in Natasha's bones, that undeniably belongs to Clint.</p><p>Or, the obligatory 'Clint has a farm' fic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Our Last Days

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, I know there are roughly eleventy billion other things I'm supposed to be writing this week, but did you know that Clint has a farm? :p
> 
> (Thanks to [mahenry424](http://archiveofourown.org/users/mahenry424/pseuds/mahenry424) for helping me hash this out. I would never get anywhere without you!)

_Sunset, home town, America_  
_Roads I used to run_  
_These walls used to hold heroes_  
_Black and white, I’m gone_  
([X](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ip_nslRYw8M))

The bird is Clint’s version of an insurance policy.

It’s a little porcelain sparrow, meant to be the sort of figurine one might set on a shelf, only the bottom is misshapen so that it falls onto its side instead.

_”Perfect, right?” he’d teased when he’d first brought the thing to Natasha’s apartment. The Battle of New York had finally convinced him that he needed a contingency plan, needed an exit strategy more secure than all the others._

_Natasha had raised an eyebrow and stifled the urge to refuse the thing on grounds of it being too tacky to keep in her home._

_“This will tell me where to find you?” she’d asked, a bit incredulously despite herself._

_Clint had nodded, still smiling, though it always felt slightly hollow since having the Tesseract in his head._

_“How?”_

_But he’d only shrugged. “Secret, right? You’ll figure it out if you need to.”_

_And she hadn’t asked again, because he was right. Compartmentalization was the point._

‘Home sweet home’ read the flowery scripted letters on the sparrow’s side--As if any reasonable person would write sentimental nothings on the wing of a bird. Natasha picks it up and turns it in her fingers, the glazed surface cool against her skin.

“Where are you?” she asks it, her voice rough with hours of disuse. Ten days since S.H.I.E.L.D fell, and no sign. It’s been too long. She has no choice but to think that he’s either gone off the grid or dead.

But the bird isn’t talking, isn’t giving her the sign he’d promised two years before. She holds it up to the light, is considering whether the lettering could be some sort of code, when she sees the imperfections in the porcelain, the spidery lines where a piece was removed and later replaced.

Natasha hesitates for a moment longer, her heart pounding as she meets her own eyes in the mirror, then smashes the figurine down hard on the surface of her dresser, feeling it shatter against her palm. There’s a tiny slip of paper among the shards, and she snatches it up immediately--the fortune from a cookie, she recognizes. But the customary sequence of lucky numbers are strangely grouped.

Coordinates, she thinks, already reaching for the bag she keeps packed in the bottom of her closet.

* * *

Natasha drives straight through, day fading into night and then morning again. She ditches her car in the last semblance of a town on the map and hikes the last four miles out into the country. Even her sat phone has lost service by the time she reaches the end of the dirt road, but she has no doubt that she’s arrived in the right place. There’s something about the house--faded white, with a dramatically sloped roof and a long porch--that resonates in her bones, that undeniably belongs to Clint.

Natasha pauses at the bottom of the driveway and listens. Nothing but wind and the far-off drone of grasshoppers, the smells of sun and summer beginning to overtake the spring. She swallows down the dread that’s threatening to settle in the pit of her stomach, refuses to contemplate what she’ll do if he isn’t here, if he truly is gone.

The front door is locked, and her knocking gets no response. She could pick the lock without much trouble, but instead she walks around to the back. The property looks mostly abandoned, the fields barren, save for occasional patches of lanky corn stalks, growing rebelliously toward the sky. A few yards away to her right is the skeleton of a rusted-out car, like a sun-bleached skull in the desert.

On the other side of the property is what must have been a barn once, now scarcely more than a dilapidated shell of weather-worn boards. Natasha walks toward it on instinct, though, quickening her pace when she hears signs of movement, the familiar _thwack_ of arrows hitting wood.

Clint is perched in what used to be the hayloft, she sees upon stepping inside, his back to her though she can tell by the slant of his shoulders that he’s fully aware of her presence. He takes two more shots at knotholes in the far wall before turning to face her, a small smile tugging at the corners of his lips though the lines around his eyes look deeper than ever.

“I see you got my message,” he says by way of greeting, swinging his legs over the side of the loft and landing in a graceful crouch on the floor.

She nods, unsure of how to begin. She’s scarcely seen him for more than a few days out of the past two years. He seems to have decided that his absolution should take the form of volunteering for as many deep-cover, semi-suicide missions as possible. Natasha can’t fault him, but she’s missed him all the same, the gulf between them feeling infinitely more vast now that they’re finally standing in the same room again.

He sighs when she doesn’t respond, reaches into the pocket of his jeans and fishes out an old key. “Here. You look beat. Take this and go get some rest. I’ll be in when I’m done out here.”

* * *

It’s dark outside when Natasha wakes to the singing of a kettle, moonlight reaching in with silver fingers through the big picture windows, drawing the spindly shadow of a tree on the floor. She’s chosen the couch because it seemed simpler than investigating bedrooms, but now she finds herself disoriented and a bit chilled. Standing carefully, she goes in search of the kitchen.

“Hi,” says Clint, as she moves to stand by the table and chairs. He holds out a mug and she wraps her palms around it, remembering the little bird in the smooth surface of the porcelain.

“I thought you might be dead,” says Natasha, breathing in the scent of nutmeg from the tea and refusing to meet his gaze. She isn’t sure what she feels in this moment--anger, and relief, and love, and everything in between too.

Clint shrugs and moves to stir a pot of something on the stove. “I was in the desert, hunting terrorists. With four of HYDRA’s best, it turns out. Kind of ironic, isn’t it? Barely made it out alive.”

“Did you want to?” asks Natasha, because she’s begun to wonder of late.

“Yes,” he says firmly, but she doesn’t miss the way the muscle in his jaw jumps.

She nods, deciding not to push any further, and sits down at the table to sip her tea. “Nice house.”

He huffs out a short laugh, and she isn’t quite sure how to read the sharp edge of it. “Sure. Maybe a little bit haunted, though.”

* * *

After they eat, Natasha wanders. She’s still aware of Clint’s presence, watching her in the periphery as he goes about washing the dishes and straightening up. He isn’t talking, though, knows better than to try and wear her down. If Natasha’s honest with herself, she can’t quite pinpoint the reason she’s being difficult now.

The living room isn’t any different from the rest of the place--furnishings decades out of date, filled with assorted debris from what appears to be a former life. There’s a pair of fuzzy bunny slippers shoved halfway under the couch, a bottle of loud pink nail polish on an end table, long since forgotten and dried hard as stone. Behind it are a few shards of broken glass, distinctive dark brown, still sharp as ever.

An assortment of school artwork is tacked to one wall and an adjacent window--holiday cards and wishes, childish stick figures holding hands, the naive pantomime of a happy family unit.

“Yours?” Natasha guesses, when she hears Clint come in behind her. She cocks her head toward the art wall, guessing that there’s no other explanation for the things she’s already seen here.

“My brother’s,” says Clint, and she decides that’s all the confirmation she needs.

* * *

She wakes again a few hours later, in the witching hour of the night. She’s been disturbed by Clint slipping into bed beside her, an old habit though he started the night with a closed door between them, in what she can only imagine was once his parents’ master bedroom.

“Bad dream?” she asks, her standard line on these occasions.

But he just shakes his head. “I don’t know. I can never sleep in this house. Used to lie away all night, listen for the sounds of a fight.”

“Haunted,” Natasha echoes.

He nods, shifting onto his back and holding out an arm. This time she doesn’t hesitate, just curls into his side and buries her face in the crook of his neck. He exhales a long breath, his body warm and solid as ever against hers.

* * *

“How are you doing?” she asks in the morning. She’s drinking tea at the kitchen table again, watching him cook bacon and eggs in a smoky skillet.

Clint looks up at that, wipes his hands on a towel and turns to search her face.

“Better,” he admits finally. “A lot better.”

Natasha decides that she believes him. Mostly. “I can hear a ‘but’ in that statement.”

He sighs. “It’s not enough. I wasn’t finished. And knowing that what I--knowing that some of my ops were for HYDRA? Natasha--I don’t know when I’ll ever be done trying to make things right, but I’m certainly not done now.”

“That’s fair,” she says evenly, thinking of her own eternal tally.

He sets two plates of food down on the table and sits across from her. “You didn’t really come out here to live with me, Nat. You and I both know you’re not a farm girl.”

She smiles sadly, doesn’t say that she’s pretty certain she never would have seen him again had she not made this trip.

“I came here to tell you that you don’t have to be finished if you don’t want to be.” She knows it’s true the moment she says those words, though it isn’t like she’s really given her purpose much thought beyond knowing that he’s all right. “Stark’s putting the team back together. There’s still a lot of work to be done. Especially now.”

Clint snorts softly. “You, volunteering to work with Stark? Never thought I’d see the day.” He reaches out almost idly, brushes his fingers over the tiny silver arrow at her neck.

“Come with me,” Natasha says again. “Come back to New York.”

“I will,” says Clint after another beat. “Just--not yet.”

“I miss you,” Natasha counters, though she knows already that she can’t stay here indefinitely. This place is a home, but it isn't for her.

“Soon.” He smiles sadly and reaches out to rest his hand over hers.

She turns her palm upwards and laces their fingers, realizing that he’s become a bit like this house--a little cracked, a little faded, and a little bit haunted, too. There’s an abandoned space behind the depths of his eyes, one she realizes she wants to fill.

Outside, cicadas begin to sing, the fever-pitch of impending summer as they sit in this place holding onto one another.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Flares](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2849345) by [enigma731](https://archiveofourown.org/users/enigma731/pseuds/enigma731)




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